Juana
Briones, her sisters, and theirfamilieslived at El
Polín Springs during the early and mid 1800s. This conjectural
portrait, based on family resemblances, shows what Juana may have looked
like as an early adult when she lived at El Presidio of San Francisco.
Many people are interested in Juana Briones’ life because she played
an important role in the founding of the Pueblo of Yerba Buena (which
became the City of San Francisco) and because she was an astute businesswoman,
healer, and rancher who challenged the gender conventions of her time.
One account of her life is reproduced below. More information is available
at the Juana Briones
Heritage Foundation.

In the often impersonal
reports produced to document archaeological projects, the people who created
the archaeological record sometimes fade from view, becoming phantom presences
lurking behind and around texts about field methods, laboratory analyses,
and artifact descriptions. When known, the life stories of the people
who lived and worked at the sites that we study can be used to personalize
the past, and can help archaeologists to begin to understand the diverse
and contradictory aims of the people whose daily routines inadvertently
produced archaeological sites.

The Briones sisters
lived at El Presidio de San Francisco for substantial periods of their
lives. They also lived and worked away from the presidio, and so their
biographies illustrate the broader spatial connections between El Presidio
de San Francisco and other locales in the San Francisco Bay Area. The
Briones sisters were somewhat unusual in that their lives and achievements
are fairly well documented in comparison to other non-elite colonists,
especially women. One of the sisters, Juana Briones, was a prominent personality
in 1840s San Francisco and many of those with whom she associated left
written accounts of their interactions with her. Additionally, she was
an astute businesswoman who engaged trusted advisers to transcribe her
correspondence and legal documents. Although she was unable to read or
write (or even to sign her own name – she marked her personal and
business correspondence with a cross), her words, mediated by the hands
of the literate persons who penned them, have claimed a place in the historical
record.

The Briones sisters
– Guadalupe, Juana, and María de la Luz – were first-generation
Californios (colonists who were born in California), all born into a soldiering family stationed at El Presidio
de Monterey. Their parents were mulatos (people of mixed African/Hispanic
descent) who had immigrated to Alta California from towns in present-day
Mexico: their father, Marcos Briones, was from San Luis Potosí,
and their mother, María Ysiadora Tapia, came from the Villa de Culiajan. Marcos and María Ysiadora had many children, including Guadalupe, Juana, María de la Luz, Felipe Santiago, Maria Agueda, Gregorio and Isaica.

In the 1810s, when
they were in their teens and early twenties, all three sisters came to
live at El Presidio de San Francisco and made their home there for several
decades. Guadalupe married a soldier named Candelario Miramontes during
the 1810s, and she and her husband are the first recorded residents of
El Polín Springs.

In May 1820, Juana[2]
married Apolinario Miranda, age 27, the son of Alejo Miranda and María
de los Santos Gutiérrez. Both of Apolinario’s parents were
listed in census records as indios from the Mexican towns of Pótam
and Culiacán, respectively (Mason 1998:102). Apolinario’s
father had served as a soldier at El Presidio de San Francisco since at
least 1790. In 1810, at age seventeen, Apolinario enlisted at El Presidio
de San Francisco as well after working for some time as a herdsman. Like
the Briones sisters he was also illiterate and signed his filiación
(enlistment papers) with the mark of the cross. His commander described
him as olive-skinned with black hair and eyes and with a broad thick nose
(Argüello 1810)[3].
Juana and Apolinario initially lived in the main quadrangle of El Presidio
de San Francisco. Sometime during the first few years of their marriage,
they joined Juana’s sister’s family at El Polín Springs.
The third sister, María de la Luz, also made her home with Juana
and Guadalupe during most of her adult life[4].

The Briones sisters
and their families maintained residences at El Polín Springs into
the early 1850s. Juana and her husband, Apolinario, requested an additional
land grant for the site of El Ojo de Agua de Figueroa in 1833 on the grounds
that Apolinario was about to retire and that they had already built a
house there. The land grant was half a mile from the extended family’s
El Polín residences and expanded the Briones’ sisters gardening
and ranching enterprises. Juana developed the land into a farm with fruit
tree orchards and a cattle corral.

Shortly afterwards
(possibly as early as 1835), Juana Briones obtained a lot in the newly
established pueblo of Yerba Buena (present-day North Beach in San Francisco)
and built an adobe house there. Her house was located right on the trail
leading between Yerba Buena and the presidio, and it appears that over
the next five years Juana and members of her family alternated living
at Yerba Buena, El Polín Springs, and El Ojo de Agua de Figueroa,
developing a prosperous business marketing fresh milk, meat, and vegetables
from their farms to sailors and merchants on visiting ships. Juana also
developed a reputation as a healer and midwife during this time.

With the proceeds
from her business, in 1844, Juana Briones purchased yet another piece
of land, the Rancho Purísima Concepción, located in present-day
Palo Alto and Los Altos hills. The land grant had been held by two Native
Californians from Mission Santa Clara, José Gorgonio and his son
José Ramon. Juana paid them $300 for the deed and permitted them
to continue living on the property after her purchase. She began developing
the ranch throughout the 1840s and eventually moved her children, her
sisters, and other members of her household there in the 1850s and 1860s
during their land tenure disputes with the U.S. Government. She purchased
additional land in Santa Clara in 1852, and later bought several residential
lots in the town of Mayfield (now part of Palo Alto) in 1883, where she,
two of her daughters, her sister Guadalupe built homes (María de
la Luz may have died by this time). As Juana’s health declined in
the mid 1880s, she moved to Mayfield permanently, although her grandson
recalled that she never resigned herself to town life: “She always
liked the Ranch better. She used to Say town was no place to have [unintelligible]
She liked Horses and cattle and everything that goes with ranching”
(Mesa 1937). Juana died on December 3, 1889.

Residential Strategies

As farmers, businesswomen,
landowners, and healers, the Briones sisters (especially Juana) have been
lauded by historians and educators as some of the most preeminent women
of Spanish-colonial and Mexican Alta California. Their land holdings are
evidence of their collective prosperity and their business acumen. But
for Juana Briones, who unarguably led the family in their real estate
acquisitions, the Spanish-colonial and Mexican-era landscape of El Presidio
de San Francisco also provided opportunities to negotiate personal difficulties
through residential strategies.

Juana and Apolinario’s
marriage was a troubled union. Apolinario Miranda was a heavy drinker
and physically abused Juana and their children (between 1821 and 1841,
Juana bore eight children and adopted a ninth[5]).
As the abuse worsened, Juana sought protection from military officials,
but Apolinario ignored the reprimands he received. Finally, in 1844, Juana
petitioned for ecclesiastical separation from her husband. As she was
unable to read or write, her petition was transcribed by one of the priests
at Mission Santa Clara. In her petition, she wrote,

…I do not
fear to shoulder the conjugal cross that the Lord my Father and my Mother
the Holy Church have asked me to bear, being in a state that I have
freely chosen. What I truly fear is the loss of my own soul forever,
and what is more, I fear the destruction of my unfortunate family due
to the scandal and bad example of a man who has forgotten God and his
own soul, whose only concern is drunkenness and all the vices that come
with it, and who no longer cares about feeding his family, a burden
that I alone carry with the labor of my own hands, a fact that I can
prove with testimonials of exceptional strength if necessary. Moreover,
my own labor and the labor of my poor family sustain my husband, providing
him not only with clothes and food, but also paying for his drunkenness.
As to how much damage he brings home to me and my family, well, as soon
as he is a little tipsy he begins to utter his blasphemies, swear, and
to put into practice his abominable behavior, not only publicly and
imperiously demanding the conjugal debt from me, but also wanting to
abuse it, as he has tried to do several times with my daughter María
Presentación, who fortunately is already married.

Your Lordship,
none of the blows, beatings with clubs, and grave dangers that I have
seen in my life, nor the brutality and cruelty with which I have been
treated, merit consideration because, if my sufferings were mine alone,
I would not bear them with pleasure, but at least I would accept them
as divine will […] Your Lordship, my husband is the greatest obstacle
placed before my children, because from him they learn nothing but swearing,
blasphemy, and ugly, lewd, and dissolute behavior. How will I excuse
myself before God, if I do not seek, as much as I can, all possible
means of ridding my family of such as bad example? (Briones 1844)[6]

Although no record
has been found of whether the Church approved or rejected Juana’s
petition for a separation, from that point forward, Juana ceased using
her husband’s name and was referred to by others as a widow. She
continued to conduct her business affairs independently and in association
with her sisters and her daughters, living, as Bowman writes, “with
no help from a worthy mate, no aids of sons-in-law, no assistance of note
from her three sons, one of whom was mentally defective” (Bowman
1957:240).

Through her negotiation
of the presidial landscape and the growing civilian communities beyond
the military reservation, Juana Briones pursued a residential strategy
that provided her with safe havens from a dangerous marriage. For nearly
all of her adult life, Juana maintained at least two and as many as four
places of residences, many of them only a short walk or horse ride away
from each other. From the quadrangle, to El Polín, to El Ojo de
Agua de Figueroa, to Yerba Buena, to the Rancho Purísima Concepción
and her houses in Santa Clara and Mayfield, she used her landholdings
to maintain close ties with her sororal kin and daughters and to create
financial and spatial independence from her husband.

Additionally, the
period in which the Briones sisters built their landholdings was a time
when adult male Californios were building personal empires based on the
material advantages of their military service, the status accrued to them
as “Spanish” dons, the properties acquired through marriage
alliances, and the political capital gained through social affiliations
with other high-status men (Hass 1995, Monroy 1990, 1998). Barred from
military service because of their gender, the Briones sisters pursued
alternative strategies that stood in sharp contrast to the gendered and
racial practices of these seigneurs. The sisters formed pluralistic households
that not only blended their African heritage with the Mexican Indian heritage
of their husbands, but also adopted at least one Native Californian orphan
and incorporated adult Native Californians into their extended family
through baptismal sponsorship, intermarriage, and long-term labor and
land-sharing relationships[7].
This ethnic pluralism may be reflected in the archaeological materials
found at El Polín Springs, which included groundstone, flaked lithics
and glass, worked shell artifacts, glass trade beads, and locally-made
ceramics along with British-produced whitewares and other imported goods.
Most significantly, the Briones sisters centered familial and economic
power not in a male head-of-household but in what seems to have been a
sororal partnership, one that allowed one sister to remain unmarried throughout
her adult life and that supported a second in divorcing her abusive husband.

The residential strategies
of the Briones sisters thus highlight the variability within military
society in Alta California during the early and mid 1800s. Without repudiating
the trend towards “seigneurial” patriarchal[8]
control of land, women, Native Californians, and livestock, the biographies
of women such as the Briones sisters expose diversity within the presidial
settlement and engender more complicated, nuanced interpretations of the
archaeological record. While the presidial community was reviving and
expanding its main quadrangle in the late 1810s, Guadalupe Briones and
her family moved out of the quadrangle into the adjacent valley. At a
time when “respect and honor prevailed between the patriarch and
the rest of this family… [and] wives were not to be abused”
(Monroy 1998:186), and when gendered relations were becoming increasingly
central to the formulation of Californio ethnic identity, the case of
Juana’s troubled marriage exposes the vulnerabilities of the adult
women who lived at colonial settlements like El Presidio de San Francisco.
It also demonstrates that, despite the growing power of family patriarchs,
at least some of the wives of presidial soldiers actively sought independent
remedies to their problems and took action to advance their own interests,
and that, at least in Juana’s case, these actions were intimately
tied to manipulations of landscape and space. Perhaps not all of the presidial
residents fully participated in the adoption of a “Spanish”
Californio identity with all its implications. Additionally, in some cases
colonists may have actively incorporated Native Californians into their
households rather than sought to distance themselves from the indigenous
people of the region.

Certainly, the case-study
of the Briones sisters is notable in great part because their lives stand
in contrast to the written accounts left by the military and religious
elite of Alta Californian military society. But rather than being seen
as an exception to a larger rule, the Briones sisters illustrate that
within the military hierarchy, the patriarchal ideology, and anti-indigenous
practices of Spanish-colonial and Mexican presidial society, non-elite
subjects were able to create physical spaces in which to advance their
own and their families’ interests and to protect themselves, to
some measure, from the abusive excesses of their social superiors.

Monroy, D.
1990 Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Cultural in Frontier
California. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.

—
1998 The Creation and Recreation of Californio Society. In Contested Eden:
California before the Gold Rush, edited by R. A. Gutierrez and R. J. Orsi,
pp. 173-195. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.

Zinko, C.
1999 152-Year-Old Home Stands in the Middle: Palo Alto Property Owners
Say House Needs to Be Razed. In San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco,
California.

NOTES

(1)
The most comprehensive published biographical information about Juana
Briones and her sisters was written by Jan Bowman (1957). In writing this
chapter, I draw on his article and research notes; on accounts written
by Loya (n.d.), Zinko (1999), and Coleman (1997); on educational materials
compiled by the Juana Briones Heritage Foundation; and on archival records
at the Diocese of Los Angeles and in the Vallejo collection at the Bancroft
Library. In March 2002 I was privileged to become acquainted with Jeanne
McDonnell, a board member of the Juana Briones Heritage Foundation, who
is currently researching and authoring a biography on Juana Briones’s
life. Jeanne very generously discussed her research with me and kindly
reviewed an earlier draft of this chapter. Some of Jeanne’s findings
contradict Bowman’s accounts, and where appropriate I have included
footnotes indicating these points of divergence.(2) There is some confusion about Juana’s birth
year and age. Bowman stated that she was 24 years old when she married,
which would have meant that she was born in 1796. McDonnell’s research
indicates that Juana was born in 1802, and was 18 years old at marriage.(3) Physical descriptions of each enlistee were recorded
to help track deserters should the situation arise.(4) Bowman states that María de la Luz never
married, but again McDonnell’s recent research contradicts this.
A descendant of the Briones family has told McDonnell that María
de la Luz married, at age 19, to a man over 50 years her senior. According
to McDonnell’s informant, María de la Luz’s husband
died in 1817, at which point she resumed use of her maiden name. It is
presumably at this time that she would have moved to El Presidio de San
Francisco to live with her sisters. Regardless, it appears that during
the time that María de la Luz lived with Juana and/or Guadalupe,
she was unmarried.(5) Cecelia Chochuilhuala, an orphan of deceased Native
Californian parents (Bowman 1957: 230).(6) Translated with assistance from Nicole Von Germeten.(7) That the Native Californians were perceived of
as “family” rather than servants is supported by accounts
of visitors to the Briones’ homes, who listed the Indian members
of the family along with Juana Briones’ children and grandchildren
(Bowman 1957:237)(8) I use this term in its historically specific meaning
relating to the rights and privileges of senior male head-of-households,
rather than in its broader transhistorical use as a synonym for sexism.